Cultural analysis in 60 minutes or less

Monthly Archives: August 2013

Although I’m facing a late summer heat wave, and it’s still about three weeks away, the beginning of school makes me think it’s fall. It’s a strange word, “fall”: really a verb—action word!—technically also a noun. Kids can recite “person, place, or thing” in a heartbeat, but fall is not any of these, not even exactly a thing. Ideas are also nouns, but fall is not quite an idea. Yes, in most parts of the world the temperature and weather literally change. But seasons are also metaphors, and the idea of fall is the most powerful one.

Many people say they love spring. But spring is a cliché. Even the name “spring” sounds too eager to please, too self-helpy, archaic slang that should have gone the way of “keen” or “corking” or “moxie.” Warmer weather, longer days, shorter clothes, life in bloom, fertility symbols like bunnies and eggs [1], school almost out, and, if you’re into that sort of thing, resurrections. What’s not to like? Spring ahead, fall behind.

It takes a special person to love fall. Trees sense the cold and pull back unto themselves, sacrificing their own expendable body parts for the upcoming months of darkness to save the whole, like trapped animals gnawing off their legs. The leaves self sacrifice for the greater good, tiny reverse lifeboats abandoning ship, each a desiccated little martyr and hero.

We imagine that it’s the leaves that do the falling. But people also retreat in winter as well: into more interesting clothes, and the interiors of home and self, even more comforting knowing that it’s getting cold and dark outside. And some of us like the feeling of falling.

Our language reflects fall’s pleasant equivocality. We speak of falling asleep, as something that happens almost by itself, pleasantly passive even as millions actively take medication and work hard to achieve it. You’d think falling would be easy. Then, once we do satisfyingly fall asleep, many of have recurring nightmares. About falling.

Warning: this is not a metaphor!

We fall in love, the language itself shaping our understanding of life’s most delicate/ confusing/ overwhelming/ important/ wonderful/terrible feeling. Fall suggests the suddenness of love at first sight, the helplessness, lack of control, and even danger. I fell for her so hard. Sounds painful. Sometimes it is. Unlike real falling, but like falling sleep, trying to fall in love will probably prevent it. What would happen, though, if we did not fall in love, but, say, flew in love—or settled in love? Floated in love, or ran in love? Poured or drew or brewed or even stewed… in love? Crashed in love? When I met her, we didn’t dance in love right away, but gradually danced closer as we got to know each other. Once we fall into a metaphor, we lack the imagination to get back up.

Few of us have fallen in any serious way in real life, and if we did, it was likely a horrifying accident, not something we would wish for. And if we’ve not just literally fallen, but fallen in something, it’s even worse. What, other than love, can you fall in that’s not terrible? And why fall in love at all? Even if I try to change the image, love is still, metaphorically, something to be in, a container, at best; an abyss, at worst. But most of us pine to fall in love. Sometimes it feels good to fall, as so many amusement park rides simulate. And, in the words of Jeff Bridges’s character in Crazy Heart, “Sometimes falling feels like flying/For a little while.”

In some ways, though, the idea of the fall has shaped the views of our moral and mortal world. Last semester, when I taught Paradise Lost, students were struck by the sadness, but also the hopefulness, of Adam and Eve’s fall, their expulsion from Eden. Yes, the fall is bad. But,as the Angel explains,

This having learnt, thou hast attained the sum
Of Wisdom; hope no higher, though all the Stars
Thou knew’st by name, and all th’ ethereal Powers,
All secrets of the deep, all Nature’s works,
Or works of God in Heav’n, Air, Earth, or Sea,
And all riches of this World enjoy’dst,
And all the rule, one Empire: only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt though not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.
(XII.575–587)

That’s precisely what’s better about fall than spring. The happiness is internal, not just external. it allows for paradise within. Besides, you can’t have spring without fall, can’t regain paradise without losing, can’t love or sleep without falling, and you can’t fall in something that’s not already deep. Spring—even Paradise—eschews fall’s depths.

The sunshine spring lovers love? It’s carcinogenic. The renewal of life? Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% fatality rate.

Happy Fall!

Time: 60 minutes.

[1] And egg-laying bunnies. I shudder to remember the Cadbury Egg commercials showing a rabbit laying a chocolate egg. KIDS: if you see this is real life, IT IS NOT CHOCOLATE.

“You” has been very busy, at least going by song lyrics. Other genres—including a lot of poetry, even though people think of lyrics and poetry as the same thing—stay away from using “you” as the dominant pronoun. You can count on one hand the number of novels written in second person. (Bright Lights, Big City; something by Italo Calvino… OK, on two fingers.) Instruction manuals, and their snooty siblings, self-help books, sure, “you” yourself away. Nonfiction—and blogs—use direct address as an occasional rhetorical device (“You can count on one hand…”). But every song is about You. Here’s a rundown of some song titles that begin with “You”:

You, Breaking Benjamin

You, REM

You & Me, Dave Matthews

You and Your Friend, T-Ride

You Are Not Alone, Michael Jackson

You Are the Everything, REM

You Are the Girl, Cars

You Belong With Me, Taylor Swift

You Better Run, Pat Benatar

You Can Call Me Al, Paul Simon

(You Can Still) Rock in America, Night Ranger

You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Stones

You Can’t Get What You Want, Joe Jackson

You Can’t Kill Michael Malloy, Primus

You Can’t Kill Rock & Roll, Ozzy

You Can’t Stop Progress, Clutch

You Could Be Mine, Guns n Roses

You Don’t Have to be a Prostitute, Flight of the Concords

You Don’t Know Me at All, Don Henley

You Don’t Know What Love Is,, White Stripes

You Drive Me Ape, The Dickies

You Dropped a Bomb on Me, Gap Band

And that’s just the “You D–“’s, with more than 40 more You-first, not including “You” contractions. This is just from my iTunes library. (Yes. Taylor Swift.) Go pull up your own playlists and see for yourself (and go ahead and post favorite or significant titles in Comments). And obviously this list can’t include all the songs that revolve around “you,” since that would be nearly all of them. “You” had to be a big shot. Who is “you,” and how do you have so much time to do everything?

All of this is a way of getting to the Song of the Summer, in caps, Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. Yes, it’s crazy popular, and you can’t listen to the radio for 10 minutes without hearing it. But it’s controversial, because the lyrics have been declared rapey, a word that fills an important vocabulary niche but that still sounds, meaning aside for the moment, like the name of a cat. A lot of it comes down to this line:

You know you want it.

It’s pretty damning out of context, especially the way I used sinister italics, sitting on the page like that creep on the public bus. And I’m not here to defend the song. (Hourman hates controversy.) But a few things are interesting about it. First, its context is not the page but rather a pretty sweet R&B song, which is melodic, playful, and even a little corny (musicians: it’s all in the flat 7s, the corniest of all intervals). How else can Robin Thicke, Jimmy Fallon, and the Roots pull off an all kiddy instrument version of the song? (Of course, I am conveniently ignoring that OTHER video.)

And the song sounds and feels nothing like what I think of as the (intentionally, to be make fun of that sort of thing, according to the group; Thicke said something similar about his own song) rapeiest song of all, Stone Temple Pilots’ raucous Sex Type Thing. Featured lyric: “You wouldn’t want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too,” totally worse than “You know you want it.” (Musicians: the main riff revolves around a flat 5 interval, which everyone knows is the devil in music).

Maybe the song could deflect its accusations better if it were one of those He said/She said songs that allow for more than one point of view and point of “you”—think Don’t You Want Me’s first verse by the Guy:

You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar
When I met you
I picked you out, I shook you up
And turned you around
Turned you into someone new

Followed up in the second verse by this, by the Girl:

I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar
That much is true
But even then I knew I’d find a much better place
Either with or without you

Balanced, dueling “you”s. Or more recently, Gotye and Kimbra’s Somebody I Used to Know, where we get the sense that both the man and woman are hurting over the breakup, not that one is right and the other wrong. First Gotye sings this:

Now and then I think of when we were together
Like when you said you felt so happy you could die
Told myself that you were right for me
But felt so lonely in your company
But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember

Later followed by Kimbra’s POV:

Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over
But had me believing it was always something that I’d done
But I don’t wanna live that way
Reading into every word you say
You said that you could let it go
And I wouldn’t catch you hung up on somebody that you used to know

No assumptions about what the woman wants, since the song allows her to tell us.

It’s also interesting to compare Blurred Lines to the runner-up song of the summer, the maybe even catchier Get Lucky by Daft Punk. Here’s the chorus:

She’s up all night to the sun

I’m up all night to get some

She’s up all night for good fun

I’m up all night to get lucky

We’re up all night to the sun

We’re up all night to get some

We’re up all night for good fun

We’re up all night to get lucky

We’re up all night to get lucky

We’re up all night to get lucky

We’re up all night to get lucky

We’re up all night to get lucky

No “you” at all! Instead, the song uses “she” and “I’ before settling on “we.” If the repeated line had been “You’re up all night to get lucky,” a la Blurred lines, it wouldn’t sound so sex positive:

You’re up all night to the sun

You’re up all night to get some

You’re up all night for good fun

You’re up all night to get lucky

You’re up all night to get lucky

You’re up all night to get lucky

You’re up all night to get lucky

You’re up all night to get lucky

Now it sounds so accusing, kinda shamey. Now, it’s not a story about two individual people, She and I, who together comprise We, but rather the lyrics’ male speaker looking at and judging the behavior of an unnamed woman.

The same thing happens if you contrast the next line in Blurred Lines: “You’re a good girl.” It’s the singer’s assessment of what the woman thinks of herself, not necessarily what she thinks. Contrast it with Tom Petty’s Free Falling, which begins with the exact same line but in 3rd person:

She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too

And with 3rd person comes the feeling of objectivity, which may be at the heart of the Blurred Lines—and, for me, the “you”—controversy. “She’s a good girl” sounds like an omniscient narrator. It means what it sounds like, or at least doesn’t call attention to its own possible ambiguity. “You’re a good girl” sounds subjective—who are you to say or know whether she/I/ you is/am/are a good girl? Blurred lines indeed. Whether we find the line—and “You know you want it”—offensive or not boils down to whether we believe the singer. If the singer—he—is reliable, and she—the recipient of the song’s words—is a good girl, and does want it, and the blurred lines of the title represent the internal conflict within the woman herself, then the song is seductive, which I take as Thicke’s—and every lyricist’s—intention. But if we doubt him, and hear situational blurred lines—he thinks that she wants it, but she doesn’t—well, that’s rapey.

But it’s up to you to decide.

Time: Over time, about 80 minutes, since I didn’t keep track that well, with double apologies for going italics crazy.